• SmokeyDope@lemmy.world
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    2 hours ago

    Eh. Meme consumers are riding a pointless high horse on this one. On one hand yes there is arguably a human aspect to manual creation thats lost and theres still plenty of screwups in generated details if you look closely. On the other hand memes and edited silly cat pictures are not high art, they’re the low effort fast food quick consumption equivalent of images. We call them shitpost, I mean come on.

    The whole point of an image is to activate a series of neurons in your brain that excite certain patterns to convey information to you. The whole point of a meme is to do this to convey humor or a poorly vieled political message with little creation efforts and high resharability.

    In the beforefore times you had to actually paint and color by hand on a piece of paper, make models and set pieces out of materials like clay, cut up printed pictures to stitch them together.

    Then we could digitize everything, create models and animations with clicks of the button, edit images easily through software, and share our creations effortlessly. This lead to the rise of the Internet’s first generation of memes with stuff like the dancing baby and flashgrounds references and caption memes.

    Now its completely effortless with machine learning models trained to create images/sounds/videos from simple sentence instructions. It probably my takes a minute for someone to instruct image models to boilerplate an acceptable picture through typing a few keywords, or import an existing image and instruct edits. All without the need to learn the ins and outs of image manipulation software, 3d modeling software, ect.

    Why spend an hour to make an edit in gimp for maybe a few dozen people to look at it once, go “heh” and immediately forget about it as they doomscroll past.

    Unlike most jerkasses with an armchair opinion ive actually cooked some comics and memes in my day for the internets consumption. Sometimes Ive spent way longer than I should have in gimp just to make a funny edit. I’m happy these tools exist to let people engage with visual creation on their own terms. If you don’t have time or hardware for learning gimp to crop a meme I won’t be on my high horse telling you that your bad and your images are fundamental wrong just because you had a computer/model boilerplate it for you from some keyword prompting. Fuck em, they get the slop they deserve to consume.